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Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

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Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#1

Post by diegogcouto »

I was thinking about the features provided by the usual blogging platforms and how they have innovated throught the years. It looked really strange when I saw that there aren't any real improvements to the final user.

Don't get me wrong, I think that WordPress, by exemple, is an awesome product, but that there is a lack of features that could be pretty useful for the users and an excess of boring administrative stuff.

I'm launching today a page to validate my hypothesis that people will like something new in this area. Do you think that there is room for innovation here?

Some features I'm working on:

* Every blog has yours own API which will allow a user to "get connected" to it (to the user point of view, it'll be only a button to get connected, every technical detail will be hidden).

* Better sign method: The idea behind Mozilla Persona is awesome and I really want to make use of it.

The idea is to make it free and open source. Any kind of feedback will be appreciated!

If you got interested, this is my landing page: http://barapps.co/rlie

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#2

Post by fragmede »

Betteridge say's no and I agree - by this point it's not that it's hard to make a blog and push content to it - the sheer number of Tumblr and Posterous blogs attests to that, it's that blogging is, well, work. I'd argue that the hard part is no longer the publishing part but the actual sitting down, writing, editing, proofreading, reviewing, fact-checking, link-checking part.

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#4

Post by freejack »

There is definitely room for innovation in the blog tools/publishing/server space, the big question for you to be comfortable with is whether or not the space is big enough for another player.

I launched a new blogging platform in the early 2000's and despite some really cool new approaches to how things got done, it was really hard to turn these innovations into a winning business. I think there's probably enough room for 1-2 players of any size, and currently, Wordpress, Tumblr and a few others are doing a great job serving the market. Don't hear me as saying you don't have a chance, just hear me as saying that even if you do bring some compelling innovations to the market, it will be a real fight for you to win appreciable marketshare, and even then, you'll have to figure out how to make money from it.

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#5

Post by jrajav »

fragmede wrote: post #2

Betteridge say's no and I agree - by this point it's not that it's hard to make a blog and push content to it - the sheer number of Tumblr and Posterous blogs attests to that, it's that blogging is, well, work. I'd argue that the hard part is no longer the publishing part but the actual sitting down, writing, editing, proofreading, reviewing, fact-checking, link-checking part.

"Can Betteridge's law be applied to literally every question, even when it's a real question and not an article headline?"

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#6

Post by jeromeparadis »

My opinion is that the features you are working on are not really specific for a new blogging platform. If you want to test these features in the blogosphere, I would recommend building a WordPress plugin to test the waters without having to reinvent the rest. If that interest you, you can also distribute a template with the plugin included and make a demo (or use it for your own blog) to show it off.

That way, you would be able to focus on what's important to you.

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#7

Post by pessimism »

Well, ask if people are satisfied with their own blog CMS, and they'll probably say "no". I had to use something as obscure as Blogofile to satisfy my needs.

## Technically

I think some competition for Jekyll is sorely missed, and no one who isn’t a nerd even knows about static blogging. Granted, it's also been a royal pain for me, when it comes to pushing automated tweets, whenever I update my blog, so there are a lot of problems to be solved. I still haven’t bothered to write something in Python that tweets based on my RSS activity. (ifttt hasn’t worked optimally for me.)

Nevertheless, it’s liberating to be able to simply create a Markdown file and write a post like this:

    ---
    title: Something Something Paul Graham
    date:  2012/09/30 23:00:00
    ---
    That Paul Graham might have a point.
Run Blogofile’s Amazon S3 uploader with one command, and boom, uploaded. As a bonus, I can back up my blog really easily using version/change control, since all files are static.

There are a lot of steps here too complicated for the average user, but all it takes is a moderately simple Mac app, and most people are golden - especially now that everyone has Dropbox to store their files.

It seems that there is a tendency for people who want to revolutionize blogging and social media to reinvent RSS. I doubt that’s the way forward.

---

## Socially

If I were to suggest an idea for a Wordpress-like platform, it would be a reinvention of the blogroll. When people don’t have the reach to attract advertizers, they can instead link to other users on the same platform and vice versa for exposure.

I would find a way to gauge the reach of blogs, and allow customers to find bloggers with similar reach to collaborate with for a mutually beneficial exposure that attracts traffic. I imagine a business model could be built on this alone, but it would probably be much easier, if people were on the same platform, say, Tumblr or Wordpress.

Tumblr really revolutionized blogging by adding a community layer onto their platform to make it a social experience that married Wordpress blogging and Twitter.

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#8

Post by diegogcouto »

bdonohue wrote: post #3

"Every blog has yours own API which allow a user to 'get connected' to it (to the user point of view, it'll be only a button to get connected, every technical detail will be hidden)" How is that different from RSS?

It's different because it's a powerful approach, I think.

Doing this, I'll make every blog open to a lot of different applications to interact with it's content.

By example, a user will be able to comment on an article published on a blog he "follows" from his own page.

Re: Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?

#9

Post by orangethirty »

Here is an idea.

- Create a blogging API. - The API should give people al of the basic functionality a blog has (post, comments, social, users, etc.). - CReate a front end that will allow developers and designers to use the API in the blog template to fill it in with content. Example:

    {% site.com/api/get/blog.title %} 

    
     {% site.com/api/get/blog.post/uniqueId %}
And so on.

What is hard to deal with blogging is not the platforms there are, but a lack of standarization. Providing a simple API that people can use to create blog around it could prove to be beneficial and profitable.

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